“I was always a big Penn State fan as a child. I always liked the Big Ten being from Minnesota, but the Gophers were terrible when I was trowing up. I played linebacker too and I always liked LaVar Arrington and Brandon Short and I always wanted to be a Penn State linebacker.”

I understand his crush on LaVar Arrington– he’s the only player I knew in grade school, and that was enough to fool my friends into thinking I wasn’t a total football n00b.
What happened?

“On our way driving to visit Penn State it was raining really hard and the visibility wasn’t good enough so we spent the night in Pittsburgh,” Fitzgerald said. “My high school coach told me that Tony Dorsett and Dan Marino and Mike Ditka went there and that there were a lot of great players who went there. So we went over to their facility and the coaches didn’t know we were coming. I met the coaches and we gave them my tape and that was how the relationship started.”

Pittsburgh invited him to play wide reciever for their team, and whipped him into fine football shape. Kind of wish he had come here– he looks like a cool dude.

To paraphrase Mark Twain: The reports of higher education’s death have been an exaggeration. American universities produce more research and relevant knowledge for the world at large than any other institutions I know of. Tuition may be too damn high, but over the long-run, undergraduate degrees are definitely worth the cost. But Penn State could be so much more. It used to be, I think.